Understanding the pervasive appeal of Pop-Tarts Bites is easy:

Would you rather have a bite of pie, or a bite of entire pie?
A red Skittle or a concentrated rainbow pill?
The east wall of a gingerbread house, or the entire 20-acre gingerbread farm?

My point is that while any individual bite of a Pop-Tart—which maxes out at around a quarter-Tart in extreme cases, or at least in my own—cannot possibly contain the same measured deliciousness as the entirety of a Pop-Tart, as in all of the crust and everything inside, in one bite. It’s like having a party-sized pizza, which typically have contentiously hand-soiling Cheese Only slices, vs. a whole-crust-and-kaboodle Pizza Roll.

Yes, Pop-Tarts Bites are tasty enough to surpass my typically quasi-topical recipe for review introductions. These spiritual successors to Pop-Tarts Mini Crisps (née Popsters) naturally come in the toaster pastry brand’s two unshakeable pillars of flavor: Strawberry & Brown Sugar Cinnamon. The de facto Pop-Tarts royal family will begin appearing in all their shrunken glory come January, but for now, I was postally blessed via Kellogg’s with enough pouches to last me ’til Christmas (edit: Christmas Eve) (edit 2: Christmas Eve Eve).

(edit 3: I need to stop eating these)

I assure you it wasn’t Kellogg’s generosity that’s earned Pop-Tarts Bites my praise. My fond recollections of elementary school lunches spent trading and tearing into various, similarly-pouched micro-cakes that constituted as cafeteria-wide currency.

Perhaps I’m old and jaded, but snack companies just don’t seem to make sweetly spongey pouched stuff like they used to. After the death of the genre’s last true bastion, the Oreo Cakester, I saw nothing—save for those sacred Hostess Mini Muffins, of course—worth popping plastic for. Until now, of course, as both flavors of Pop-Tarts Bite boast __ (ultimately a mournfully low number) of fully iced, fully filled & chunkily crusted puff pastries. Each bulbously swells with sweet nectar, and the crust is crumbly enough to give it a much yellow-cakier taste and mouthfeel than traditional golden-shortbread Pop-Tart flour fringes.

This stuff practically melts in your mouth, letting the brown-buttered Twinkie crust taste and lightly creamy icing baste seamlessly melt into each flavor’s joyfully colored and royally jellied innards. I’ve always said the best part of a Pop-Tart isn’t the crust or the filling but the intersection of the two, and these chubby bites have filling crust-fully beset on all sides like 8 tiles in a dangerously delectable game of Minesweeper.

In Strawberry’s case, the brightly and sprightly candied Starburstishness of its artificial fruitiness is a pretty spot-on translation of its flatter forefather’s sprawling inner pastures. Though I did notice some alluring echoes of other red berries, like cherry and raspberry. It’s addictively iconic and a great contrasting lifeblood for its shortcakey shell.

Brown Sugar Cinnamon likewise does a great job of not just renewing but remixing the widely-loved coziness of it namesake pastry. In addition to the familiar flavor energy of a brown-sugar-baked Cinnabon nucleus, Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tart Bite filling boasts a bonus butteriness, and a tantalizing twist of something like molasses. Again combined with a nurturing cinnamon bun-battered crust, the final product may force me to reconsider my holiday cookie plating strategy.

If I put little swords in them, they at least count as hors d’oeuvres, right?

As I’m biographically noted to do to all Pop-Tarts products, I popped my Bites into the biting cold of my freezer. When they came out polar fresh, I was surprised to see that while their flavors remained largely the same, the once-delicately divine crust and creamy filling took on the doughily chewy texture of mochi ice cream. Needless to say, this direct flavor upgrade has evolved any brown-baggin’ lunchbox plans I may have had into classily ice-packed bento box affairs.

Totally unintentionally, Pop-Tarts Bites really managed to fill an Oreo Cakester-sized hole in my heart: not just for being dreamily cakey, but for taking an existing nostalgic memory and bringing something more original to the lunch table than a direct reboot. Aside from the small pouch (and therefore box) size, there’s not much bad to say about Pop-Tarts Bites. They don’t promise much yet still bring big flavor that still manages to let me do something normal Pop-Tarts don’t:

The best thing they’ll ever footnote one day in my coroner’s report.

The “Bowl:” Pop-Tarts Bites

The Breakdown: A tasteful remake of a peripheral Pop-Tart classic, both flavors of Pop-Tart Bite add both exciting texture and diverse flavor to make for a great anytime snack that needs to last more time.

The Bottom Line (Both Flavors): 9.5 gallons of gingerbread milk made by gingerbread cows out of 10